I bought a slim phatty just to try out the Moog thing and I'm finding this is pretty much my favorite synth. It just has a life and body to it that others don't I get immediate inspiration from it. I've read that there are mixed feelings about the Moog but for me I'm a convert. I'm wondering what do you get by jumping up to the Voyager?

The latter includes my own basses demo from 2008. I was experimenting with the dual filters in a feedback configuration while boosting the oscillator mix's treble with a sonic maximizer pedal to get most of those sounds. The gist I get from what I've seen over the years is that they both exhibit character one associates with the Moog name, and the Voyager appears to have more sonic potential, but more people seem to appreciate the phatty's more, both in terms of character and ease of use: a better price/performance ratio. I always point out the Voyager tends to sound less bright and cleaner/smoother, while also having a deeper low-end. Its stability combined with use of the Highpass filter or high resonance make it sound downright digital at times. Being able to program it to the extent of doing things like modulating resonance and cutoff together for filter sweeps, in order to get more low-end, is nice. The external expansion capability is nothing to sneeze at, but you can do alot with just the internal mod matrix.

I sold it some time ago while unemployed and mostly now I just miss the envelope and portamento behavior! What the charlatans tend to call "musical", whatever that means. Very useful for leads anyway. Too bad the Model D excelled at leads in some small part due to how it could cut through a mix. Trying to do the same with the Voyager is a hopeless task.

"Lots of people are nostalgic for analogue. I suspect they're people who never had to work with it." - Brian Eno

My experience with the Little Phatty is that it has a very distinctive character of sound, and that character is somewhat pervasive in it. The Voyager, on the other hand, is powerful... but seems to lack any sort of general character except that defined by function.

The Phatty seems to have a sort of tone, the Voyager does not.

That being said, the Voyager is a bazillion times more powerful and flexible than the Phatty... and if you don't like the Phatty tone, you're not going to like the Phatty.

‎"I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -Charles Babbage"Unity and Mediocrity are forever in bed together." -Zane W. http://www.youtube.com/automaticgainsay

The plusses of the Voyager are the many extra features: better/more mod routings, the 3rd VCO which can be used as a second LFO, the second filter...no other Moog has a HPF...and it responds to aftertouch.

The plusses of the Phatty are way lower price (RME cost me 3x what Phatty did) and (seriously) the interface. If you use presets (don't admit it to anyone, OK?) the LED rings around the knobs give great visual feedback when you want to tweak a preset (Voyager knobs have no visual relationship to the current patch settings).

I'm no tone nazi, they both sound like Moogs to me, Voyager just has a wider palette.

I listened to Hatfield and the North at Rainbow. They were very wonderful and they made my heart a prisoner.

meatballfulton wrote:I'm no tone nazi, they both sound like Moogs to me, Voyager just has a wider palette.

Well, I'm not the first to say that a Phatty has a specific tone.Both sound like modern Moogs to me. But neither sound like vintage Moogs to me.

Yes, I am a Tone Nazi.

But if you're not into tone... why waste your time with analog at all?

‎"I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -Charles Babbage"Unity and Mediocrity are forever in bed together." -Zane W. http://www.youtube.com/automaticgainsay